The Salish People: Volume I. Charles Hill-Tout

       Non-shaded areas indicate the extent of Hill-Tout’s field-work.

Introduction

      Charles Hill-Tout’s earliest report, on the Thompson (1899), and his last, on the Okanagan (1911), are linked together geographically and culturally to the extent that one description “might have been written, with a few minor and unimportant points of difference” for the other. Hill-Tout knew that the Okanagan report was to be his last, and he made it attractively retrospective and valedictory.¹ It speaks for itself. This Introduction will consider the earlier report and present the two men who together made it the remarkable document it is: Hill-Tout, the self-educated and dedicated ethnologist, newly arrived from England, and Chief Mischelle of Lytton, one of the most talented and informed people that a beginning field-worker could ever hope to meet.

      It was not the practice in the early days of anthropology to dwell on the personality of one’s informants. This was no doubt partly to protect privacy, but also in large part due to the temperament of the one man who set the tone and pattern in the Northwest, Franz Boas. Boas was not constitutionally inclined to make friends with his informants nor spend more time with them than the serious business of science demanded; and he elevated this trait into a theory: an informant is a spokesman for the tribal past, and one cannot inject prying questions or pleasantries without contaminating the medium.² Hill-Tout did not have Boas’ austerity, but he was too much of a novice to stray far from the Boas mode. Thus he gives us no sustained picture of Mischelle, just glimpses along the way.

      James Teit, though he lived not far from Lytton, seems never to have contacted Mischelle. He does, however, make it possible to approach Mischelle indirectly, through a notion of what chieftainship meant to the Thompson and a description of his illustrious predecessor, Chief Cixpentlem, a man of mythic stature. Cixpentlem is supposed to have introduced potlatches to the area, and been so wealthy that he “was able to give one every two or three years on a very large scale.”³ His magnanimity extended to a most remarkable act of diplomacy: with the declared intention of making perpetual peace with the Lillooet, he travelled round neighbouring Shuswap and Okanagan territory as well as his own, buying up Lillooet slaves, and then set out for Lake Lillooet with them. He was met by armed men, and in an act of great personal courage he “went out alone to them, and soon persuaded them to lay down their arms and to receive the party.”⁴ He stayed there several days, and gave presents to all who had had relatives killed by the Thompson. “He told them that he had come there to put an end to war between his own tribe and them, and as surety of this he had brought to them all their people who had been slaves in his tribe. These he had bought up at much expense, and now he gave them their freedom and returned them to their country and friends. The Lillooet chiefs made a fire, and they and the Thompsons sat around it and smoked before the people.” Teit dates this event 1850, eight years before the treaty with Governor Douglas, which Cixpentlem also negotiated.⁵ Cixpentlem becomes a measure for our estimation of Mischelle; for, when he died after a long life in 1888, there was a grandson in the tribe who might well have succeeded him,⁶ but Mischelle was elected, a remarkable achievement for someone whose father was from down-river at Yale.

      “Nowadays,” Teit writes in 1897, “chiefs are elected by a vote of the people, no doubt influenced by the priest or the Indian agent, and remain as such so long as they acquit themselves honorably, or the people are pleased with them.” They supervise the ecclesiastical and political affairs of the reserves, settle in council all petty disputes, and are spokesmen for tribal grievances.⁷ In other words, Mischelle was chief because of his usefulness. He was the Cixpentlem of a later age, a cohesive personality, generous with his time and attentive to the difficult truce with the white man, maintaining his balance and sense of humour throughout. And while being a translator in the law courts and for the missionaries, he was also an interpreter of his own people’s history — as Hill-Tout was lucky enough to discover.⁸

      Of Hill-Tout’s family background we know little more than that he was born of Somerset farming stock in 1858, and there was strong Church of England influence. The daughters of the vicar of Kirby Grindalyth in Yorkshire write to say they are looking forward to his Easter visit: two sweet, vacuous letters, saved from Hill-Tout’s boyhood, indicate the milieu which would have been his had he not emigrated.⁹ As a theology student he preached in Cardiff, and later married Edith Mary Stothert, who had been a member of the congregation. He completed courses at a seminary in Lincoln. His path was cut out for him; the missionary field was waiting, or a rural living, the gift of a relative. However, he was mingling with a rather advanced set of religious thinkers, the Puseyites of the Cowley Monastery just outside Oxford; and he became caught up in the raging debate of the time, the pros and cons of Darwin’s theory of evolution. When he came out on the “wrong” side, emigration to Canada must have seemed a good solution to the social consequences of his “intellectual difficulties.”

      According to an unsigned but obviously well-informed typescript biography,¹⁰ Hill-Tout came to Toronto with a letter of introduction to Dr. (later Sir) Daniel Wilson of University College. He was intending to farm, but Wilson said: “We want someone to take over Dr. Tassie’s private school, which is run by the Low Church party.” Hill-Tout found the offer irresistible until, after three years, he got the chance to buy a hundred acre farm near Port Credit on Lake Ontario. Before very long a summer resort wanted the land, and he eventually relinquished it at many times the purchase price.

      One reason for selling out was that, by this time, he had four or five children, for whom he wanted an English education. Also, his own intellectual development had to find its flow: would it be in Canada or England? At the 2 April 1887 meeting of the Canadian Institute of Toronto he had delivered a precocious paper on “The Study of Language,” a polemical piece, valuable as evidence of the author’s ambitions. Four years before, at the founding of the Royal Society of Canada, Daniel Wilson prophesied that “in the future of our young Dominion men will arise to bear a part in letters and science not less worthy than those who figure on England’s golden roll.”¹¹ England’s golden roll still tempted Hill-Tout; but Wilson had called the Haida “a vanishing race,” and had spoken privately to him about the untouched field for anthropological research in the West. Hill-Tout was inspired to journey to Vancouver, while sending his family on ahead to England. “Upon arrival in Vancouver,” the typescript biography informs us, “he met an old college friend, the Rev. Finnes Clinton, rector of the pioneer Anglican Church of St. James, who was just on the point of starting a boys’ school and asked the new arrival if he would take charge. Just then a cablegram arrived from Mrs. Hill-Tout stating that one of their children had died. The offer was declined and Professor Hill-Tout returned to England, and the family settled down at a very lovely spot, St. Brevils, expecting to remain there for some years.” A financial reversal beyond his control caused Hill-Tout to pull up